16 Oct 2023
Second driving season with the Alpine in now over and the car has been put into winter storage. This driving season started on 10 April 2023 and ended on 14 October 2023. Car has now 19,089 km on the odometer which means that I have driven approx. 9 thousand kilometres this year.
Highlight of this driving season was the European road trip in May during which I drove approx. 3,500 km. This summer also included several enjoyable moments at the wheel of the Alpine on the smaller twisty Finnish roads.
I find the Alpine to be great compromise between being perfectly suitable for day-to-day driving but on the other hand being a car which can be very much enjoyed on those twisty minor roads.
Alpine does have good number of modern comforts to ease the day-to-day living since it does have among others an automatic gearbox, automatic climate control, Android Auto, plenty of space for a tall driver like me (191 cm), comfortable seats and surprisingly comfortable suspension.
On the other hand it has to be said that storage space inside the car is minimal and the luggage space is not that great either. If it is very important to be able to drink coffee or something like that while driving, then A110 will not be a right car for that person. A110 doesn't have glovebox, no door pockets what-so-ever nor cup holders. There is a storage shelf on the centre console where I tend to keep my phone, as well as small storage box between the seats where I usually keep my sunglasses.
I bought two small storage boxes from a French company called Atelier Design Mecanique at the beginning of this driving season to add a little bit more storage space. I received the storage boxes just before the long European road trip in May and they were quite useful on that trip. The boxes have velcro attachment and they can be installed either behind the seats or next to the sides of the seats.
During the long road trip I noted that attaching the boxes on the sides of the seats was not that practical. Also, since I'm quite tall there is not enough room for the box behind my seat. The box does however does fit nicely behind the passenger seat where one of them has been located during the whole driving season and it has proven to be a nice little addition to the storage space.
In relation to practicality, A110 is also quite low car and the bucket seats look unpractical. Despite that a little older person like me has had no problems in getting in and out of the car.
All in all the small flaws related to practicality haven't bothered me at all. A110 is perfectly suitable for day-to-day use in my opinion.
How about the enjoyment side of things? Well, A110 does have lots of things which add a lot to the driving enjoyment. The low weight (for a modern car) of approx. 1,100 kg is one big factor on this. The double-wishbone suspension is quite comfortable on normal driving and on the twisty stretches of the road Alpine does lean somewhat on the corners. However, when driving enthusiastically it seems like the car dances through corners like it knows exactly what you think and abides to your commands to a tee.
When I drive the Alpine I use Sport mode almost always. And when it is time to enjoy driving I turn the music down and switch the gearbox into manual mode. Even though I'm more of a manual gearbox person, I have found the Alpine's dual clutch gearbox to be nicely interactive on the manual mode. The paddleshifters have nice and sturdy action and pretty good feel. However, like I've mentioned before I would like the shift paddles to extend further down.
One big benefit of the Alpine is the fact that it is possible to enjoy driving on it even on sane speeds ie. it is possible to enjoy it responsibly. Excellent!
Overall I have still really enjoyed driving the Alpine and there hasn't been any major issues with it either. The slightly odd behavior of the Alpine telemetrics which occurred sometimes on the first driving season hasn't been such a problem this year. What happened last year was that when I launched telemetrics it gave a message to restart the engine to finalize configuring telemetrics. Sometimes the message disappeared but sometimes a reboot of the multimedia system was required to get telemetrics up and running. This year the same message has appeared sometimes but has always disappeared after a while. Perhaps some software update has solved the issue.
Only issue which occurred during this driving season was an occasional rattle coming from the passenger door. Perhaps something is loose inside the door? The rattle disappeared in autumn but it might came back next summer. We'll see.
There were no other issues this year so it's been very much problem free driving.
The car still gets a lot of attention. On many occasions I've been approached by somebody keen on talking about the car, sometimes somebody has even followed Alpine to the petrol station to have a chance to complement the car etc.. Biggest chances on getting to discuss about the car are on the car related events. This summer I visited Sportscar Breakfast Club event twice and one time I visited an event called "Autoharrastajat Ahvenistolla".
22 Aug 2023
Now there are some nice photos of my Alpine. I was approached by a young photographer called Perttu Rantakaulio who wanted to take some pictures of my A110. Few of Perttu's pictures of my Alpine can be found below. These pictures were taken close to where I live. More car photo's by Perttu can be found on his Instagram account @finnishexotics.
19 May 2023
The service interval for Alpine is either one year or 20,000 km and the first service was due in spring 2023. The only official Alpine service in the Nordic countries is in Stockholm which would've been the obvious choice for servicing my Alpine. I, however had the urge to do some kind of a road trip in Europe, and when a need to participate on a work-related conference in Vienna in early May materialized, I devised a plan to combine holiday, servicing the car and work on one trip.
The plan was to take a ferry from Helsinki to Travemünde in Germany, drive through Germany and Austria all the way to the Slovenian Alps. Then few nights in Kranjska Gora in Slovenia followed by three-day work conference in Vienna. Then a quick dash from Vienna to Travemünde via Prague. My stepdaughter Essi would fly to Munich where I would pick her up and she would fly back home from Vienna. Trip would be two weeks, and Essi would be travelling with me for a week.
It would've been most convenient to have the car serviced in Vienna during the trip but the offer for the service in Vienna was 780 EUR, which for me was quite expensive for a basic service. Therefore, I decided to ask for offers for service from some German Alpine dealers also. The offer from Alpine Centre München was slightly over 800 EUR but Hamburg dealer offered the service for 500-600 EUR and the Alpine Centre Nürnberg offered it for 560 EUR. Hamburg would've been quite convenient for me, but I was planning to be there on May 1st which is a bank holiday in Germany and the dealership would've been closed that day. So, I ended up with Nuremberg dealer.
So, that was the plan and off we go!
The journey started on Saturday 29 April 2023 when the Finnlines ferry took off from the Vuosaari harbour in Helsinki at around 4 pm. My Alpine was categorized as a low car at the harbour, and it was directed to a separate queue with another low car, a new Porsche 911 GT3 Touring. Interestingly, the GT3 driver was pretty enthusiastic about the Alpine when he saw it. We boarded the ship as last ones but at the destination we were among the first ones to get out from the ship. Nice!
The ferry trip took 30 hours and we arrived to Travemünde at around 10 pm. on the Sunday evening. I had booked my first accommodation in Seevetal at the southern edge of Hamburg which was about one hour drive from Travemünde on the pitch-black German autobahns.
I started heading south from Seevetal first thing in the morning, my destination for the day was Bamberg. The driving distance for the day would be approx. 500 km and initially I made swift progress - at best Alpine had 240 km/h on the speedometer. However, driving fast on the autobahn is quite exhausting and not necessarily pleasant, so at lunch break I decided to head towards smaller roads. The rest of the driving day was more relaxed all the way to my destination Hotel Bruckertshof in Bamberg.
After dinner I had an evening in Bamberg. Bamberg is located in Bavaria in southern Germany, and it is one of those German towns which has not been extensively destroyed on the second world war. There was for example the Altes Rathaus which is built on the river and the Bamberg Cathedral (Bamberger Dom) which was originally built around thousand years ago.
Tuesday 2 May was a multi-phase day.
I started driving from Bamberg to Alpine Centre Nürnberg at 8 am where I had promised to be at 9 am. When I arrived there, I left my car for service, and I was promised that I would be able to pick up the car at around 2 pm.
Prior to visiting Alpine Centre Nürnberg, the only other Alpine A110 which I had seen live was the A110 which Alpine Antwerpen salesman used to pick me up from my hotel when I was collecting my car. Therefore, it was interesting to be able to see other Alpine 110's at the Nuremberg dealership.
I had few hours to spend in Nuremberg while waiting for the car to be serviced. Nuremberg hadn't survived second world was as intact as Bamberg but there were also interesting things to see.
I walked back to the Alpine dealership after seeing some of the Nuremberg sights, and I got the car back at around 2:30 pm. The final cost for the service was 629 EUR. This first-year service is very basic service including new oil, oil filter and air filter. Considering the extent of the service, I think that the cost for the service was pretty high.
Next on the cards was a one-and-a-half-hour drive from Nuremberg to Munich airport where Essi was already waiting for me.
After leaving Munich we headed towards Bruck an der Grossglocknerstrasse on the Austrian Alps. The drive there took about three hours from the airport and gave us a first chance to drive nice alpine roads and see some snow peak mountains.
The total journey length of the day was approx. 600 km. Our accommodation for the night would be a hotel called Thurners.
I had selected Bruck an der Grossglocknerstrasse as our destination for the day because it is right at the foot of the Grossglockner Alpine Road which is an amazing alpine road that rises to 2.5 km altitude. I have driven the Grossglockner Road twice before but it would've been lovely to be able to drive it with my own Alpine. Usually, the road opens after winter closure on the first part of May and with good luck the road could be open when we would be there.
Indeed, the road had been opened two days earlier on the 1 May but there had been lots of fresh snow on the mountains on the 2 May and therefore the road was closed on the 3 May when we were there. We did drive to the toll road gates and were told that the road might open later in the afternoon - or not.
We discussed a little bit on what would be our plan. We had a long drive to Kranjska Gora ahead, but we ended up driving to nearby Zell am See. The idea was to spend the morning there and to wait out if the Grossglockner Road would be opened.
We had our lunch at Zell am See and since Grossglockner Road hadn't yet been opened, we decided to cut our losses and started heading towards Kranjska Gora. I changed the navigator setting to avoid main roads which lead to us driving on numerous curvy alpine roads. Alpine was in its element. Essi also had a chance to drive nice alpine roads with a car that was made for that kind of driving.
We crossed the Austrian-Slovenian border south of Villach. The dash across the border took us to a steep alpine road - the maximum steepness of the road was advertised as 18 %.
We arrived to our destination Kranjska Gora early evening. Plan was to spend next five nights there. What an enjoyable driving day this had been!
The plan for our first day in Slovenia was to head to Triglav National Park for hiking. Triglav National Park is the only national park in Slovenia, but it covers quite large area and there are a lot of hiking trails available. Slovenia's highest mountain Mt. Triglav (2.864 m) is also at the national park.
We started driving towards Vrsic Pass (1,611 m) early in the morning. Kranjska Gora village altitude was around 800 meters. The Vrsic Pass is the highest pass in Slovenia and the road leading up to the pass has 50 corners in total and the curves on there were mostly pretty tight.
Once we got to the Vrsic Pass we realized that the hiking trails starting from there were still covered with so much snow that we couldn't start any hikes from there.
Since we couldn't do our planned hike from Vrsic Pass it was time for a plan B, which included plenty more driving on beautiful alpine roads. First, we headed to the other side of the Vrsic Pass where we found for example the lovely turquoise Soca river.
We also ended up on a small Trenta village on the other side of the pass from where we continued towards Italy. Once again, we had the pleasure to enjoy more great alpine roads. The steepness of the road was advertised as 23 % at some point.
When we reached Italy, we made a quick stop on the Lago del Predil Lake before heading to a town called Tarvisio where we had Italian pizza.
We did another stop in Italy at Lago di Fusine lakes. We walked around the other one of the two lakes which was a nice-looking small lake.
There was short drive from Lago di Fusine back to Slovenia where we had another quick stop to see Planica and its famous big ski jumping tower.
Since there was still snow on the higher altitudes, we decided to head for hiking trails on the lower altitudes on Friday 5 May.
Our first stop was at the Pericnik Waterfalls (Slap Pericnik), which are easily accessible with only few minutes' walk from the car park. There were two waterfalls but we visited only the larger one which is the nearest one to the car park. Lovely looking high waterfall, and you could walk behind it. The was lots of water spray on the air. Wonderful place!
The next phase for the day was to drive approx. an hour to a walking route close to Bohinj Lake. The route took us to Mostnice Waterfall (Mostnitski Slap). The walk took about 2.5 hours including breaks and it was a pretty easy walk below treeline.
After that we drove to Lake Bled where there were quite a lot of other tourists.
There is also the only Alpine dealership in the Balkan region near Bled in a town called Lesce. We took a quick visit in there also.
New day and new tricks - or perhaps old ones since we went to see yet another waterfall. The destination for today's hike was Martuljek Waterfalls (Martuljkov Slap). The hike started from a village called Godz Martuljek and the hike took us approx. three hours with altitude difference of slightly more than 400 meters. This time the route was bit more challenging including some steeper sections with ropes to help hikers.
We enjoyed our lunch on our accommodation Apartma Angelca in Kranjska Gora.
Other places which we visited during the day were two small artificial lakes called Lake Jasna nearby Kranjska Gora. Nice little lakes with lovely mountain view on the background.
We had targeted to find a hiking route for this day which would take us to as high altitude as possible, but not so high that it would have so much snow that it would prevent the access to the trail. We ended up selecting a trail which would take us to Lukjna Pass at the altitude of 1,758 meters. The starting point for the hike was Aljazev Dom at 1,015 meters.
This hiking trail took us above treeline and the views to the mountains were lovely. However, we did not reach Lukjna Pass since we encountered deep snow at some point of the hike. Our hike was about two hours, whereas the planned hike would've been approx. twice that much. However, since the mountain views were great on this hike, it didn't really matter.
Another lunch in Kranjska Gora and since there was plenty of the day remaining, we decided to jump on the Alpine again to drive to Austria and on the Villach Alpine Road. The journey to the beginning of that road was only half an hour so it was quite convenient trip from Kranjska Gora.
The toll road Villach Alpine Road rises to 1.8 kilometres in altitude. The road is mostly below treeline and the views are not as lovely as in the Grossglockner Road, but from the perspective of driving this is also an excellent road. There are lots of corners on the road, and some of them are tighter than the others. There are still plenty of lovely sweeping curves on the road which are enjoyable to drive. The Vrsic Pass Road in Slovenia has very tight corners and the road condition is not very good in many places, but the Villach Alpine Road has better road surface and from the point of view of driving was a more enjoyable experience. Both roads had very few other users at the beginning of May.
We drove from Kranjska Gora to Vienna on Monday 8 May. This journey was mostly on highways. Essi had an evening flight from Vienna to Finland and I stayed there for the three-day work-related conference.
During the trip we had the following luggage with us: I had one carry-on baggage, small back-bag, hiking boots, laptop, suit bag for work suit and shoes for work on a separate small bag. Essi had a 38 litres back-bag and a laptop. We managed to get all of these on the Alpine and I managed just fine on a two-week trip and Essi on her one-week leg of the trip.
I spent next two days in Vienna for work. Fortunately, I did also have some time to have dinner and see the sights in the city.
After I had finished my work obligations on the afternoon of Thursday 11 May, I packed my bags to the Alpine again and headed towards Prague. The driving distance for the day was 350 km and I arrived in Prague early in the evening.
My accommodation in Prague was at the Unitas Hotel which was familiar to me from one of my previous trips to Prague. Nice old, refurbished building only few hundred meters from the old town and secure parking area on the courtyard. All this for a reasonable price. Highly recommended.
The Friday 12 May was the longest driving day of the trip. It included 700 km of driving from Prague to Travemünde harbour. I started the journey at 8:30 am and arrived to Travemünde at 10 pm.
I drove through Czechia on a highway. The driving culture in Czechia is quite aggressive. People are tailgating very close to you and speed limits are not that well respected. One other thing that caught my attention when in Prague was that other people took a lot of interest in my Alpine when driving there.
When I got to Germany, I drove only first 50 km or so on the autobahn before I changed my navigator settings to avoid main roads. This changed estimated remaining driving time to my intermediate destination Schwerin from five hours to seven hours. Well, driving on smaller roads in Alpine is quite nice, but I must admit that I was a little weary when arriving to Schwerin early in the evening.
Before I got to Schwerin, I did drive approx. 30 km stretch on the autobahn and since there was very little traffic, I managed to test Alpine's high-speed skills a little bit - highest indicated speed was 250 km/h.
Schwerin, which is in Northern Germany on the communist era East Germany area seemed like an interesting place to visit and I had planned a few hours stop there before heading to Travemünde harbour. Schwerin turned out to be even more interesting place than I had anticipated. It was surrounded by several lakes which is not uncommon to us Finns, but it also had beautiful old town and a big and beautiful castle - things that you don't find in Finland.
There was only a small stint from Schwerin to Travemünde. I took a small detour via Wismar and then headed to Priwall where I took a very short ferry trip to Travemünde city. Then a quick stop at the city before heading to the harbour.
The last leg of the trip was the 30-hour ferry trip back to Finland. A nice opportunity to relax and to take it easy.
Did it make any sense? Well, no.
Was it an enjoyable experience? Definitely!
A two-week road trip to Central Europe was a lovely experience and it also offered a possibility to get my Alpine serviced. I hadn't visited Slovenian Alps before, so it was interesting to see that corner of the Alps also. There was still so much snow on the mountains in the beginning of May that we didn't manage to do hikes in the higher altitudes this time. We did see some great sights and did nice day hikes anyway.
I also had a chance to see some new-to-me German cities as well as a chance to visit Vienna and Prague which were familiar to me from other trips.
The total driving distance on the trip was approx. 3,500 km which meant quite a lot of driving. There were no issues with the car what-so-ever during the trip and it was a lovely experience to be able to drive my Alpine on the kind of roads to which it has been designed for.
Even though the luggage capacity of the Alpine A110 is quite limited, we still managed to carry two-person luggage (including suit bag and laptop needed for work) for two/one weeks in it without problems.
Lovely alpine roads, beautiful mountain views, great hikes, and gorgeous waterfalls. Great experience!
10 Apr 2023
The Alpine is now back on the road after six months of winter hibernation. I travelled to my original home town during Easter to pick up the car and to drive it back to my home.
During Easter there was 20 cm of snow where I live but the amount of snow on my home town where the car was, was approx. 60 cm. However, since all the main roads were already dry, I was hopeful that the conditions would be such that I would be able to drive a car with summer tyres safely.
Therefore it was a little bit of a surprise to realize that the small road leading away from my homeplace still had a thick layer of snow and it was also very icy and slippery. The next few hundred metres long section before slightly wider road was also in poor condition. It had 10 cm deep grooves with hard ice on the side of the grooves. After that bit of road it was all dry and clear roads.
The night temperatures were way below zero degrees celcius but day-time temperatures were clearly above zero. This meant that after a cold night in the mornings the conditions were most slippery but they improved slightly during the day.
My plan was to start my journey back home on the Easter Monday 10 April and luckily I got some help from a friendly neighbourhood farmer who laid some sand on top of the icy road to increase grip. This helped me to get through the slippery sections and onto the dry main roads. Success!
The car itself started flawlessly and worked perfectly after being in the garage for six months. It seems like the CTEK battery charger did its job.
Now the car is at home and since I've owned it almost a year, soon will be time to get the first service done to the car. More on that on the next update.
16 Oct 2022
Alpine is now in winter storage and the first driving season with the A110 is over. It's time to summarize 2022 experiences. The driving season started on 26 April 2022 when I picked up the car from Antwerp and ended on 15 October 2022. Car has 10.127 km on the odometer which is pretty good achievement for the first five and half months of the ownership.
Nothing much has changed in terms of my opinion of the car since I wrote my first report on my experiences with it after one month and 3,000 km. I still love the car.
I've had plenty of opportunities to explore the characteristics of the car during the summer. I've taken the long and winding way home and also to many other places so many times during the year which probably describes how much I have enjoyed driving it.
On my earlier report I used words agility and effortlessness to describe how the car feels to me. With more kilometres the appreciation of those characteristics has grown even more. And what is remarkable is that it is not necessary to drive very fast to enjoy the A110.
I drive with sport mode on for 95% of the time and that is true even on the more mundane trips on city traffic or highways. I just like the sound the A110 makes on sport mode and added responsiveness compared to normal mode. On sport mode the car generally uses lower gear and keeps revs a little bit higher than on normal mode.
Alpine is my first non-manual car but despite my doubts I have enjoyed the A110s automated DCT gearbox. Always when I want to drive enthusiastically on winding roads I switch to manual mode which allows me to use the paddleshifters behind the steering wheel to change gears.
The paddles have nice and accurate feel to them. They are however fixed to the steering rack and I would like them to be longer on the bottom to be able to reach them better on all situations. Life 110 makes nice aftermarket parts for the A110 and they have longer version of the paddles available which look like they would be a direct answer to that criticism.
The car has received lots of attention during the summer. I've had several people come to talk to me on petrol stations and other places to compliment the car - and to ask what the hell is it. Finnish people tend to be pretty reserved and introvert so it has been a little surprising how many people have commented the car on a positive note.
Most people have never seen a new Alpine A110 in Finland so on the other hand it's understandable that it draws so much attention. My A110 was only second new A110 when I imported it to Finland at the end of April 2022. During summer 2022 a third A110 has also been imported to Finland. That is an Abyss Blue 2021 car. Therefore there is one grey 2019 car in Helsinki, mine is Alpine Blue 2022 model located in Hollola and the latest addition is darker blue 2021 car which is located in Turku region as far as I understand.
I've participated couple of car events with Alpine during the first driving season. First of all I've been to an event called Sportscar Breakfast Club twice. That is a nice informal gathering of sports cars in Tuusula.
I also visited a small French car meet nearby me in Lahti at the beginning of the summer. Last event which I participated was called Sports cars at Luukki Mansion which took place in Espoo at the end of August. This was reasonably small meeting with approx. 70 cars and to my surprise my Alpine was awarded with a silver place on the sports car category. That was a nice suprise.
With regards to practicality, I have used the car as daily driver and I really don't have any problems using the car everyday. Sure, the storage space is very limited, the car is pretty low and the visibility through the rear window is not good at all but those things don't really bother me at all.
On the other hand, even though the car is low, it is surprisingly easy to step in and out of it and the Sabelt buckets seat are easy to access in addition to being surprisingly comfortable. And the car is not low at all in terms of ground clearance.
Well, are there some things which I dislike. Not much and those are very minor. What I don't like is the ventilation system. The centre vent is not adjustable in volume and direction. It just blows air without any possibility to adjust it in any way. Also the side vents near the side windows are only adjustable in direction. That is something I don't like.
On my first report I told that the updated multimedia system is quick enough. I think that I have to change my mind a little bit on this. Mostly I use Android Auto and there are no problems when using it. However when using the cars own multimedia functionality it seems like it is not that fast.
Another thing to note is that I think that the radio reception is not that good. I very rarely listen to the radio but when I've done that it seems like there are some problems with reception.
The sound quality on the optional Focal audio system is quite alright in my opinion but I do think that my 2019 Fiesta ST with B&O audio has better audio quality than Alpine.
The only problem with the car has been with Alpine telemetrics which is still constantly behaving erratically. Everytime I start it it gives me a message to restart the engine to finalize configurating the telemetrics. Sometimes the message disappears after a while but sometimes I have to reboot the multimedia system to get telemetrics up and running.
So in summary I love the car and haven't had any major issues with it so far.
Car is now in winter storage at my original home town which is almost 400 km from where I live. I have bought CTEK MXS 5.0 battery charger which is plugged in to the A110 battery for the winter. Hopefully the car will start problem free when it is time to bring it alive again for the 2023 driving season in April 2023.
22 May 2022
Running-in period of the car is now almost over and here are my impressions of the car based on the first month of ownership. The first 3,000 km have included varied type of driving, boring motorway trips, city driving but luckily also nice, narrow and winding tarmac roads.
Agile and effortless - those would be the first two words which I would use to describe A110. The lightness of the car is very pervasive on the A110. The car being so light impacts so many things positively. Since it doesn't have so much weight to carry, it helps agility significantly.
Even though the car is not that powerful, the power-to-weight ratio is quite good and that is very much related to the effortlessness. The A110 accelerates, decelerates and corners very effortlessly and once again the lack of weight plays a big role in this.
One thing to bear in mind though is that my comparison points are not other sportscars since I've never owned or even driven something like Porsche Cayman or Lotus Elise. Instead I've owned several hot hatches, some of them quite good in their category, and they are what I can compare the A110 to. My previous cars include Fiesta ST, Megane RS 265 Trophy, Abarth 500 esseesse and Alfa 147 GTA.
What I can already say at this point is that driving an A110 on a nice small countryside road is a pleasure. I can now fully understand and agree with several journalists who have said that A110 is a car in which you don't need to drive crazy speeds to enjoy the it. It feels like the A110 can sense what you want out of it and does what you want from it - yes - effortlessly.
I like the steering feel of the car when driving enthusiastically on a winding road. The steering is not that heavy but you have a good feel on what is going on under the tyres. Also the brakes have very good feel and they are easy to modulate. I didn't spec the bigger brake option on my car and so far I haven't regretted that choice one bit. The standard brakes feel very much adequate for my purposes.
Suspension of the car is smoother than you might expect. That is a good thing. The lightness of the car means that the springs don't have to carry that much weight and the ride doesn't have to be rock hard. During enthusiastic driving on a curvy road the car dances around nicely and on more mundane driving tasks smooth suspension is quite comfortable which is of course nice.
Where the A110 doesn't shine is motorway driving. It is not the most stable car on higher motorway speeds and feels a little uneasy there. Especially the front end feels little restless on the motorway which is perhaps partly due to the weight distribution on a mid-engined car. The uneasiness on the motorway is most likely the downside of lightness.
The A110 is my daily driver from spring to autumn so how does it meet the practical needs of a day-to-day driving?
The short answer to that question is that surprisingly well in many respects but not so well on some other fronts.
The car is pretty low but it is not too difficult to get in and out of the car. Sabelt bucket seats are less intrusive than I thought and they are also softer than expected. Seats could actually have a little bit more lumbar support in my opinion. Overall they are more comfortable than I anticipated.
Even though the only adjustment to the seat is the ability to move it forward/backwards, I can still get a good driving position. I'm tall and skinny (191 cm / 80 kg) and I have the seats set to the lowest position. The steering wheel is adjustable both in height and reach and it enables me to get the wheel close enough which I like.
I was a little worried that the lack of adjustments might mean that my stepdaughter who is 30 cm shorter than me can't get a good driving position for her, but it seems like my fears were unfounded. She has driven the car once and she said that the driving position felt good and she had good visibility out of the car.
Yes, the visibility. Well, the rear window is tiny and you can't see much from the rearview mirror but otherwise the visibility out of the car is surprisingly good.
The updated multimedia system on the 2022 model is good enough in my opinion. The multimedia system on the older cars was not very much liked by the owners but the new system with Android Auto / Apple CarPlay does what is needed perfectly adequately. How big of an improvement the new system is I can't say because I haven't used the older system at all.
I mostly use Android Auto while driving and the functionalities are the same as on any other car with Android Auto. The car's own multimedia functionalities seem quite logical and the system is quick enough.
The lack of storage space is a well known issue on A110 so there were no suprises there. It hasn't really bothered me much. At some point Alpine changed the upholstery material of the A110 which meant that velcro tape doesn't stick to the interior material of the new cars. That means that it is not easy to find storage solutions to add some storage space.
Since I had limited budget I had to leave out some options which would've been nice to have. After one month I don't have regrets with what I chose.
I put some money into Alpine Blue color and I'm glad that I did. The color is even lovelier in the flesh than in the pictures. Very nice!
The biggest worry for me with regards to options was the lack of sports exhaust on my car. I can't compare the sports exhaust to the standard exhaust which is on my car since I haven't heard the sports exhaust in the flesh. What I can say however is that even the standard exhaust sounds quite nice.
The standard exhaust does pop and bang on the sports mode on the downshifts and when lifting the gas pedal. There is also nice swooshing sound coming from the engine when accelerating hard. Perhaps these sounds are more prominent with the sports exhaust but at least in isolation the standard exhaust does enhance the driving experience nicely.
If I'd had more money, I would've also opted for the light Fuchs wheels and they would've come with bigger brakes also. I don't miss the bigger brakes at all. The standard brakes have good feel and modulation and feel powerful enough for regular road use.
The Fuchs wheels would've definitely been nice but the Serac wheels on my car are not too bad lookswise either. Maybe sometimes in the future a set of aftermarket wheels are in the cards. That remains to be seen.
The only problem so far have been slight issues with the Alpine Telemetrics. Telemetrics is an option and it didn't appear on the applications menu on the multimedia when I picked up the car. We tried to get the Telemetrics up and running with the dealer but eventually agreed that he would try to find out what the problem is and inform me later.
I managed to get the Telemetrics to appear on the menu on my way home but it was just showing a message which prompted to restart the engine to get Telemetrics running. Well, restarting the engine didn't resolve the problem but when I got back to Finland the Telemetrics miraculously started working.
The same engine restart messaage does still appear often when accessing telemetrics but it usually disappears after a while. There is some kind of a bug anyway.
To end this report on a positive note, I participated an event called Sportscar Breakfast Club on the 21 May 2022. It was a nice and relaxed gathering of sportscars and even though there were several Ferrari's, two Lamborghini's and many other lovely sportscars, my Alpine did gather quite a lot attention on the event. That is quite understandable since most of the visitors hadn't seen a new generation Alpine A110 before. There is only one other new A110 in Finland so it is a rare sight here.
